Research Question: Will trained volunteers significantly affect patient experience compared to educational fliers or no intervention?

Background: Patient experience continues to be an important issue with our nation’s healthcare system especially with the adoption of Value Based Purchasing for hospital reimbursement. With the use of Honor Health Scottsdale’s large number of volunteers, we hoped to design and develop a program that will improve experience for patients presenting to a community based Emergency Department.

Objective: To evaluate the impact of Emergency Department Volunteers on the patient experience.

Opioid prescription rates across the country have been declining since their peak in 2012, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The 2016 national prescription rate was the lowest in a decade at 66.5 per 100 people.

The 10 states with the highest opioid prescription rates in 2016 all saw decreases from 2015. Rates shown are per 100 people.

On Thursday, the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) reported that since March 7, at least 22 people have developed severe bleeding soon after taking synthetic pot products. The bleeding has not only occurred from their eyes and ears, but from their noses and gums as well. Patients have also vomited up and urinated blood, experienced large, unexplainable bruises, and had extremely heavy menstrual bleeding.

There’s been no single product tied to all the cases, though the majority of patients recalled buying their products from dealers, stores, and friends around the Chicago area. As of yet, there have been no reported deaths.

“Despite the perception that synthetic cannabinoids are safe and a legal alternative to marijuana, many are illegal and can cause severe illness,” said Nirav D. Shah, director of the IDPH, in a statement this week. “The recent cases of severe bleeding are evidence of the harm synthetic cannabinoids can cause.”

In this era of electronic medical records and instant communication, where doctors can work from anywhere, the Greeley oncologist can check test results, read patients’ emails, prescribe medicine or review treatment plans well into the night after already working a full day in his clinic.

The very tools designed to create more flexibility for doctors may be leading to an “epidemic” in physician burnout and an exodus away from the profession.

A group of medical centers and organizations including the American Medical Association recently created the Charter on Physician Well-Being as a catalyst to address the growing problem of physician burnout.

AMA President David Barbe said in a statement “the mounting burdens of the modern health care delivery system are taking a toll on physicians by contributing to the growing problem of work-induced burnout and emotional fatigue.”

Treading into ethically and legally uncertain territory, a New York end-of-life agency has approved a new document that lets people stipulate in advance that they don’t want food or water if they develop severe dementia.

The directive, finalized this month by the board for End Of Life Choices New York, aims to provide patients a way to hasten death in late-stage dementia, if they choose.

In 2016, 63,632 people in the US died from a drug overdose, a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has concluded. And many more of those deaths were caused by potent opioids obtained on the streets than in years past.

The CDC tally is a slight downgrade from a preliminary estimate released by the government last fall, which found there were 64,070 overdose deaths that year. But the overall conclusion remains true: Overdoses caused by all categories of drugs (alcohol-related deaths are counted separately) rose from 2015 to 2016, with the largest gains seen among synthetic opioids like fentanyl and its analogs.

According to the new report, there was a roughly 21 percent increase in the age-adjusted overdose death rate from 2015.

iPhone users at more than 100 hospitals and clinics in the US can now access parts of their medical records through the Health app, Apple announced today. The Health Records section of the app debuted in January with the iOS 11.3 beta, and today’s update makes it available to everyone who updates their phone to the latest version.

The medical information — such as allergies, medical conditions, vaccinations, lab tests, medical procedures, and vitals — will be available to iPhone users who are patients at 39 health systems that are working with Apple, including Stanford Medicine and Johns Hopkins. Before the update, the medical records section of the app was only available to the people who had signed up to test a pre-release version.